by Peter Gadol
According to the directory by the elevator, there were three media companies sharing the building along with accountancy and production companies, but no real estate firm as far as I could tell.
“Ma’am.”
“I thought there was a developer with offices here, a real estate developer,” I said.
“Come back this way, please,” the guard said, ushering me to the reception desk, where I put the same question to someone wearing a headset.
“Not that I know of,” the receptionist said.
“Has there ever been any kind of real estate office here?”
“Not that I’m aware.”
“How about someone named Carey Taylor?” I said. “I should’ve asked that to begin with.”
“We don’t keep track of every employee,” the receptionist said, “only the companies. The people come and go, but let me try something...”
She tapped at her keyboard, but nothing came up, and I didn’t have a photo of Carey on my phone I could show her. I had no photos of him whatsoever.
“I did once follow him into this building,” I said, right away regretting the comment: the receptionist now regarded me with some alarm.
I sat outside by the fountain and watched the water plume and recede. The guard kept walking over to the side of the revolving door to see if I was still there. Don’t worry, I’m not a crazy woman, I wanted to tell him, except maybe I was.
I realized it was easier to believe Carey had been hurt and/or incapacitated because if that wasn’t the case, then why hadn’t he tried to reach me? In my mind, I replayed our interactions of the last few days; had I said something that had bothered him? Should I read something into the fact he initially wanted to go on the hike alone?
I had no idea where Carey lived, although I didn’t think it was far from me because occasionally when he’d go retrieve something from his apartment, he wasn’t gone long. How little I knew about him.
I headed over to the museum and peered down into the sculpture garden from above. There was the steel cube dancing man, the giant red tricorn hat.
I drove to the grocery where I’d once followed him.
Back home, I sat on his side of the bed and reread the texts he’d sent me, usually logistical. He would be at my place when. I needed what from the store. I had no saved voice mail from him—he never left me messages. The detective wanted me to find him to be my exculpatory witness; I wanted to find him to know our months-long affair was authentic, because now I was having my doubts. How insidiously trust leaked into the air, trust the thinnest of all gases.
Did I really think I’d find him again practicing his serve on the tennis court? It meant returning to the park, which made me unsteady. None of the courts were in use. I walked around the restrooms between the upper and lower courts. I stepped into the empty men’s room. The doors had been removed from the stalls. Someone had scrawled graffiti: “Careful, snakes.” As in: watch out, humans, be on the lookout for snakes? Or as a warning to the snakes themselves: beware, we’re on to you.
I had no reason to believe Carey had even remained in the city, but I also couldn’t understand why he would flee. He had to be nearby, he had to be. I thought I could find him, and the only method to do so that made sense to me was to wander around without a plan, although I knew that wandering around without any set destination was harder to do than it might seem. I needed some kind of vague scheme or I would only end up driving in circles through known parts of town.
The first lake I drove to sat in the hills a few miles west of the park. It was the one of three I knew about near me without having to consult a map, the farthest from where I lived. I drove around it twice, which was to say I drove around the street and looked at the garages of houses bordering the lake. There was a minor lookout though, a turnout where I could scan the water without getting out of my car. The lake was pale and unanimated, without any currents or ripples. Carey had said he wanted a house on a lake, and I knew he probably meant a lake in the mountains, but that didn’t stop me from wondering if he was holed up in one nearby. I looked for real estate signs with the thought one might be on the market, it would be his listing, he’d have the keys, he’d hide there.
The lake nearest to my house was the reservoir, currently drained and weedy. There were signs explaining how it was being rehabilitated, the water supply secured underground in new massive tanks because that was the age we lived in; exposed drinking water was threatened drinking water. Above the buried tanks would be a shallow decorative pond behind a tall wire fence, not that it would matter if anyone got to it. I knew all of the houses around the reservoir well since this was where I ran, but I looked for Carey here.
Another lake, not far, was the only one where you ever saw paddle boats or children with toy boats. The park was empty now, too hot at midday, no one out.
I ventured farther out to the lakes at the edge of the city but still within the county limits. Another reservoir, another pale body with concrete banks. South in the county, there was a series of square pools where a marina had been planned and never finished. I crisscrossed the city three times in one day. Did I really think I would find Carey this way? No, but as long as I kept moving forward, I was able to quiet my mind.
I found several more lakes to visit the next morning, each smaller than the previous, odd blue parabolas interrupting the otherwise strict grid. I knew a heat wave flattening the city had to be why I was seeing very few people around, but I did check my phone to make sure I wasn’t the only person who hadn’t heard the news of a disaster, radiation everywhere, a toxic cloud. And in that scenario, did I really think the one other soul who would be out and about would be Carey? Would he pedal by on a bike? Would he be casting a rod into one of these fishless bodies of water?
All told I drove around looking for him for two and a half days. I say there weren’t other people around, but I’m exaggerating, of course there were, and at one point, I noticed a small white hatchback in my rearview mirror that I was fairly certain I’d caught a glimpse of the day before, as well. I had to assume that once again I had become the subject in someone else’s game.
I had driven north and west along the spine of hills through a gulch of newer homes and car dealerships to a park where fast-growing eucalyptus dropped pods into a pond to the point the pond looked littered with reptile carcasses. I didn’t get out of my car and instead tore around a curved road and exited the park by a different road than the one I’d entered. I didn’t go too far into the neighborhood before pulling over and waiting. And there it was, the white car, peeking tentatively beyond the park gate, also pulling over, its driver (whom I was too far away to see in my mirror) holding back, probably scanning the road for me. I revealed my position by driving forward fast and veering right at the first possible street. Again I pulled over and waited, and I saw the white car come up the road past the turn I made. He’d lost me. I swung into a fast U-turn, made the right, and now I was the one following the white car, which after five or six blocks pulled over again, the driver likely spotting me behind him.
I drove in slowly, not exactly wanting to scare him off, and also unsure if I was up for a confrontation. Maybe this was a dangerous idea. The closer I came, however, the more I began to recognize the back of the driver’s head, hair once long, now short.
I slammed the door when I got out of my car and marched over to Ezra, who got out from behind the wheel of what I guessed was a rental.
“What are you doing?” I yelled. “You’re following me now?”
Ezra mumbled something I didn’t understand.
“I saw you yesterday,” I said. “You’re pretty lousy at this.”
I had to wonder now what it must have looked like to him, my zigzagging the city lake to lake.
“You’re, what, concerned about me? Is that it?” I asked.
“I am,” Ezra said, “yes.”
“Don’t be,” I said.
“You’ve been driving—it seems like nowhere—all day,” he said.
“You said you played the game and disappeared as a way to hurt me,” I said.
“It wasn’t the only reason—”
“A way to make me see once and for all what a wretched soul you were so I’d move on. Except I don’t think that’s what you were really up to.”
I waited for him to correct me, but he didn’t say anything.
“Maybe you sold yourself on the idea you were helping me, and this made you feel better about your selfishness, but I had very little to do with it. You were only concerned about your own destiny, not mine, not ours, yours alone.”
In the distance, a siren rose and fell.
“Say something,” I said.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Yes. You’re right. Yes.”
“You can’t follow me, Ezra.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing, and I’m worried,” he said. “Something is going on. You’re in over your head.”
“Oh, fuck off. Fuck you for disappearing, and fuck you for coming back. If I see you stalking me again,” I said, “I will get a restraining order.”
When I drove away, Ezra was still leaning against his car. High overhead a dark chevron of long-tailed birds coasted north, and I wondered if he was thinking he should follow them back to where he’d found sanctuary.
WHEN WE WERE SITTING ON MY COUCH AND EZRA TOLD ME about the months he was gone, he said it was indeed from a fellow manager at the bookstore that he first heard about Craig’s essay, although his colleague had described it disparagingly: Craig had walked away from the wreck that was his life and gone into hiding, and in the end, maybe he himself achieved clarity, but was the world a better place with strangers randomly chasing each other? Ezra said that no, it was not; privately he was intrigued. He couldn’t remember how long he’d been running in circles, around and around past the same markers. And then he’d cooked me his mushroom risotto, and we’d looked at the art book, and had sex—had was the word Ezra used, and had was the right verb: to make love was to create something; to have sex was to answer a fleeting appetite, nothing more than consumption.
But it had been consequential, and Ezra admitted he was miserable the next day. Would he ever come into his own? Could he make a life apart from me? He wanted to be remeeting me on a midsummer rooftop, our twenties ahead of us. He wanted never to have met me at all. He wanted to blame me for his unfulfilled self; blaming me, he decided, was childish.
One morning over breakfast, he said, he reread the printout of the essay. He packed his shoulder bag with his journal, pens, a spare T-shirt, a pair of boxer briefs, socks, and a few toiletries. He left behind his phone (no technology), as well as his car. He wore his best walking shoes and sunglasses and a baseball cap. He checked himself in the mirror before he left, squeezing the brim of the cap: Incognito Man.
The first person he spotted was a woman walking a big dog, the dog tugging the woman, who was having trouble keeping up. Ezra stayed on the opposite side of the street, a half block behind. The woman looked frail to him, and he speculated she’d recently survived difficult but successful surgery, survived in large part because she enjoyed the affections of this dog. But now that she was well, she found the dog tested her strength and—and what?
He didn’t answer his own question because he was distracted by a man pushing a stroller his way. Ezra assumed he shouldn’t make eye contact, but he did, in part because the father was familiar, an actor maybe. Both father and infant had espresso beans for eyes. When the man glanced back over his shoulder, maybe wondering what Ezra was up to, Ezra stopped at a bus shelter and sat on the bench. The only logical thing to do now was get on the next bus, which he did, and which carried him to the ocean.
It was easy to follow an elderly couple at the boardwalk, the two of them loping along, unable to lick their ice cream cones before the ice cream melted. He was moved by how much they seemed to be enjoying each other’s company. They stopped for a long while and watched a young man and woman lying out on the beach, and were they thinking this was them decades ago?
Ezra boarded another bus, this one headed up the coast. He ended up in a seaside town with thrift shops and diners. There were kids skateboarding during the school day. He watched a man clipping stems in the alley behind a florist. He watched a woman look at pottery in an antiques store, flipping every vase to check the price tag.
Another bus, one more town to the north. He followed two teenage boys into a movie theater and sat two rows behind them. The movie was nothing more than a sequence of detonations, but when he noticed the boys were holding hands, he was happy. I understood what Ezra meant when he said they filled him with vague hope about things. It was dark out when he emerged. He considered sleeping on a park bench, exposed to the salt air, but it was too chilly for that, and instead he found a cheap motel.
The next morning, a man in a baggy suit left the diner where Ezra had breakfast and got on a bus, so Ezra did, too. He liked the idea of riding buses regardless of the destination. Like me, he had always been a rule follower, and playing the game the way Craig had set it up came easily to him. In another seaside town, he picked out a mailman at random, then followed a guy wearing a narrow black tie and handing out religious pamphlets, then a martial arts instructor sweeping out his studio. He had nothing in common with any of these men, but he did his best to forge a connection: the mailman needed to finish his rounds early so he could run errands for an elderly aunt; the pamphlet distributor wasn’t comfortable being evangelical, but he had to trust he would be in time; the sensei was worried about making the rent this month, what with fewer kids taking his classes, but it was best to stay busy.
Ezra spoke with no one he followed, which he didn’t have to tell me ran counter to his natural outgoingness. At night he slept in inexpensive rooms. He wanted to keep his head clear and didn’t drink any alcohol. He ate well enough but would pretty soon run out of cash. Each day he journeyed farther north. Each day he observed acts of kindness: a woman letting an older man check out before her at a grocery store, another woman helping another older (and confused) man get his bearings. A man refilling hummingbird feeders in front of his house. A guy who while walking his miniature pinscher had to stop, kneel, and give the dog a good nuzzle because he simply loved him so much. Humans were innately good; this was the conclusion Ezra wanted to convey to me, although this sounded less like a revelation than the renewal of a long-held belief. On a good day, Ezra said, he could go for hours without thinking about himself, surrendering his ego to empathy. It became clear to me as he was describing these nonencounter encounters that he was much more successful in playing the stranger game than I had ever been.
After a week Ezra lost track of time. He was living as the sun rose and set. He did suffer anxiety about the bookstore manager and colleagues he’d left behind. About me to an extent, although he needed not to think about me, not yet, he said. He calculated he had two more weeks before he would run out of money and would need to curve homeward, but he had the sense he was on the brink of transformation and wanted to keep going, to give himself over completely to the unpredictable, to surprise.
It was exactly two weeks later that he ended up sitting at the counter in a restaurant one hundred fifty miles north of the city and one hundred miles inland. A woman asked if the stool next to him was free, even though all of the other stools at the bar were unoccupied. Ezra noticed that she was carrying a mug of coffee with her, and it became clear that she’d been sitting in a booth by the window and maybe had been watching him. She asked if he had been traveling awhile. Yes, she suspected he had. She said he looked like someone who had no particular place he needed to be, and also that he was relying on public transportation—
Ezra had to interrupt. How did she know all of this about him? The woman was old enough to be his mother
and was wearing a gauzy scarf and gauzy blouse that didn’t seem heavy enough clothing for autumn this far north. Her lipstick was too orange for her complexion. Maybe she had been playing the stranger game, too, and now was breaking the rules. But no, he was wrong. The woman had a proposition. She had been driving all day and was dangerously exhausted. Her destination was still hours north, and she hated driving at night, especially on roads she didn’t know. She was headed for an artist’s colony at the top of a mountain, and she was wondering if Ezra could drive her the rest of the way. She would pay him, and give him money for an overnight stay somewhere and for his next bus fare.
Why did she trust him, Ezra wanted to know. Forget whether he was a rapist, how did she know whether he was a good driver? The woman, whose name was Lois, tilted her head and stared at him a long moment and said she didn’t necessarily trust him, but her greater concern was getting where she needed to go. Although he never admitted it to the artist, Lois, her faith in him was flattering at a moment when he needed flattery. He liked the idea that he appeared dependable and open.
Ezra described Lois’s small truck, the back packed with rolled canvases, plastic bins of art supplies, and old strapped luggage. She was chatty. She said she should tell Ezra about the new body of work she would start at the colony, but she hated that term, body of work, so pretentious. Did Ezra ever read the artist’s statements in galleries? He didn’t? Good, they’re awful. And what about him, was he a creative (another term she deplored, an adjective bent into a noun). Ezra said that despite aspirations earlier in life, he was not a creative with a body of work to speak of, and the woman said she liked him. Lois told him he was young, he would figure everything out, and Ezra said, Not that young. To which Lois replied, Young enough.
The conversation wound on like this, but once they reached the mountain several hours later, Ezra had to concentrate on the narrow curves through the darkest woods. When they arrived, Lois told Ezra to wait in the truck while she checked in with the staff person who had stayed up late to get her settled. Then Ezra drove Lois down a dirt road to a cabin, her studio for the next month, and he wasn’t sure what would happen now. Clearly there were no motels nearby. How would he get down the mountain if he had to leave Lois’s truck up here? After he helped her unload her gear, Lois told him colony residents were not supposed to have overnight guests, but she’d gotten permission for him to stay one night. Someone would drive him down the mountain in the morning. Ezra surveyed the chilly open space, which only had one bed pushed up against a far wall, the bed wrapped in plaid blankets. Lois uncoiled her scarf. What was she expecting now? But Lois said he could take the bed and she’d nest in the loft. Ezra hadn’t noticed the ladder in the corner, the overhang of the loft. His assumption embarrassed him, and he insisted on the loft.